Youth, muscle and attitude: Lecce win at Atalanta validates Baroni methods

O n paper, it looked like a game Atalanta should win. They had been rounding into form since the start of 2023, piling up goals and muscling their way back into the fight for Champions League places. last weekend, a 2-0 win away to Lazio leapfrogged them above the Rome club into fourth, so Sunday’s fixture at home to 13th-placed Lecce should have been straightforward by comparison.

Football matches, however, are not played on paper. Nor, as the Lecce manager Marco Baroni reminded us recently, are they played on a video game console. “There are some Playstation maestros out there who think our system of play doesn’t work,” he said after a 2-0 win away to last-placed Cremonese this month. “They’re wrong.”

A 59-year-old manager with more than 15 clubs on his coaching CV, Baroni has been around the block enough times to know his own mind. He has heard the grumbles about his 4-3-3 all season, and for much of the last one as well. Lecce stand accused of being too predictable, too rigid, too defensive. Baroni could not give two hoots.

He led Lecce to first place in Serie B using the same formation and now has them on track to survive their first season back in the top flight. This despite the smallest wage bill in the division – barely a sixth of what Juventus spend – and regularly fielding teams with the youngest average age.

It is common to see newly-promoted sides cling to experience, reinforcing their squads with veterans who have been there and avoided relegation before. Monza, bankrolled by Silvio Berlusconi, marked their arrival in Serie A this season by raiding the likes of Napoli, Inter and Verona for Andrea Petagna, Andrea Ranocchia and Gianluca Caprari.

Lecce have taken a different approach. Without a billionaire